I have two “biggest takeaways” from this experience:

1. Running a social media account is way harder than it seems.
   1. I thought to myself “I've been posting on Instagram for the past 12 years, how hard could doing it for someone else be?” Future me: “it is very hard.” making posts and actually posting them was the easy part, and reading and understanding the analytics and feedback was easy too. I just didn’t know what to do with that data to make the posts more successful. 
   2. To be really honest, I still don’t really know how to actually apply the information I gather from the analytics, but it is my understanding that that is not a particularly easy task even for people who do that as their whole job. Next time, I will just be doing a bit more research and asking for help in this department.
2. Working all by myself on a professional project is not as ideal as it is for an academic project. 
   1. Working on a school project with a group is an automatic *groan, eyeroll*, so I thought being the only person working on the social media and website would be great! I got complete creative control. However, creating everything from scratch with no help or input was very challenging. 
   2. I feel like I now know better how to approach a big and/or ongoing project on my own. I need to do a lot more research and prep work next time.

    Something that really impacted me to be a better communicator was the fact that my supervisor was very hands off and relaxed about how my internship and projects and progress was happening. I had to go into our weekly meetings ready with all my own talking points and with prepared questions and suggestions because I knew he was not going to lead the conversation. How much this internship benefitted me was in my hands completely, and I believe that made me grow as a professional and a person in general. I feel like I would be very capable and prepared to do something similar to this as a part of a team in the future.

    Victor Boutier has been so patient with my progress and understanding of my heavy workload this semester that has been preventing me from creating as much content as I could have otherwise. He is so understanding and is constantly encouraging, and for that I feel as thought I cannot repay him. However, to show my thanks, I have agreed to continue to work for him for free and just upkeep his Instagram and Facebook accounts and maintain his website. 

My final progress pictures are screenshots of the website I have been working on all semester. I couldn't figure out how to screenshot more of the pages, but you can see the vision and the vibe. Its not live yet, but this will be the new and improved www.boutierwinery.com